DISCLAIMER: The tips you find here may not be for everyone. Your mileage may vary, as always, but understand it’s mostly targeted to automotive dealership websites.

Since the release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), many website owners have struggled with finding the specific data they need, especially those in industries like automotive.

Over the last 12 months, I’ve focused on helping clients simplify their GA4 setups to better track website traffic. This newsletter is designed to give you an easy approach to isolating traffic for specific pages on your automotive dealership website.

Over the last 20 years, I have helped many clients with specific requests like the ones I will share below.

In short, usually they are terrified of the Google Analytics platform, and they just want to be able to see the raw website traffic data for specific pages on their website, at a glance.

Then I started working in the automotive marketing world and that request was more important than ever.

The Request: Find Traffic Going Directly To My “Sales” Pages

As you know, websites have many different types of content.

For automotive websites, I like to bucket those into “sales”, “service” and “about” content.

• Sales will include product listing pages and product detail pages.
• Service will include service scheduling and service specials pages.
• About will include the homepage, about, staff, directions and other pages.

For this request, let’s take a look at the product listing pages, or search results page (SRP) and the product detail pages, vehicle detail page (VDP).

GA4 Is Simpler Than It Looks

Automotive websites often follow a straightforward URL structure, so setting up filters is easier than you might think. The goal here is to isolate the sales pages, like inventory pages, using a simple filter.

First, gather the URLs you want to track—these might be the pages that show your vehicle listings, such as /used-inventory/index.htm or /new-inventory/index.htm.

If you’re unfamiliar with writing filters or regular expressions (regex), you can use tools like ChatGPT to generate the correct filter for you.

Simply paste your URL list into GPT and ask for a ‘GA4 page path regex filter that captures these URLs,’ and you’ll get something like this:

/used-inventory/index\.htm$|/bargain-inventory/index\.htm$|/new-inventory/index\.htm$|/all-inventory/index\.htm$|/certified-inventory/index\.htm$

NOTE: Your URLs might vary slightly based on your site structure, but the process is the same.

Then it’s time to get Into your GA4 account and apply the sales index page filter.

TL;DR – Or follow the images below⏬

• Open your GA4 account and navigate to your report.
• Click the pencil icon in the top-right corner.
• Add a filter for the page URLs you’re interested in.
• Save this filtered report with a clear name like “Traffic to SRPs” for easy reference.

▶️ First find the pencil icon in the upper right of your report window.

▶️ Then follow the steps here to get that filter applied to the table.

💡PRO TIP: When you “Save as new report” for the new filter, make sure you name it something like “Traffic to SRPs” or something you can easily recall later. We’ll be adding it to the sidebar soon.

▶️ If everything goes as planned, you will get a table that looks similar to this.

Now, the entire point of this process is so that you will quickly be able to click from the left menu and see these pages isolated with website data.

Filtering traffic to specific pages is useful for a variety of situations. For example:

• Tracking page performance: If you’re working with a vendor or agency to improve your inventory or service pages, you can use these filters to instantly see whether their changes are driving more traffic or better engagement.
• Monitoring campaign success: You can also isolate traffic that comes directly to these pages from your marketing campaigns, helping you measure success without digging through multiple reports.

By creating these custom reports, you save time and get a clearer picture of what’s working (or not) on your site

In my case, when working with multiple GA4 accounts and needing to pull together information quickly, having these setup is just more efficient.

This works great if you are working with a large website that might even have sections of the website dedicated to specific locations. In that case, you just isolate each of the page path URLs associated with each location and save the report just the same as above.

There are many ways that you can filter in this process. I believe you can build up to 5 filters in case you needed to narrow the data even more.

This Is Just The Beginning

Once you create and save this report, you’ll have a fast and easy way to track how visitors interact with your most important pages.

This simple setup can save you time and give you a clearer view of your website’s performance.

If you’re still unsure or need help setting up GA4 for your website, feel free to reach out.

Building custom reports, filtering data, or optimizing your site, I’m available to help make the process easier for you